Medical Lore in the Bestiaries

Abstract

SoME time in the first part of the Christian era, perhaps as early as the second century, there emerged a curious collection of zoological fables and religious moralizations called Physiologus."5 It may have begun as a group of tales about animals and their attributes. The number of different creatures originally was about forty.'67 The Physiologus was copied repeatedly and, in time, was greatly expanded, clerical compilers adding to the moralizations, which became more and more elaborate-and lengthy. Because such a manuscript was a kind of 'book of beasts', it acquired the name bestiarium or bestiary. Physicians took a hand with it, which was not surprising, since in the Middle Ages educated medical men were also clerics.57 They were familiar with the ideas of Pliny, Solinus, Placitus Sextus, Isidore, and others about animals, their habits, and the supposed virtues of animal preparations in medicine. As a result, some of the special curative powers described by classical authors were gradually attributed to certain of the bestiary animals.** Finally the moralizations disappeared from the bestiaries and there was left a welter of fact and fiction, hearsay and imagination, about a whole zoological garden of real and supposed creatures ranging from ants to dragons to elephants, as well as about healing plants and stones. From all this eventually emerged, thanks to the labours of indefatigable if credulous encyclopedists, the first zoology books since the classical period. Such, for example, were the De animalibus of Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth century, the Buch der Natur of Conrad von Megenberg in the fourteenth century, and Conrad Gesner's Historiae animalium in the sixteenth century.1'25"49 Authorities agree that the bestiaries were widely read. The original Greek Physiologus is lost, but its earliest descendants, a sturdy progeny, exist today in manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgic, and Arabic, most of these versions and translations having been made by the fifth century.'5 The * This research was supported by a grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies and by grant LM-O019,

In search of traces of the mandrake myth: the historical, and ethnobotanical roots of its vernacular names

“…A Latin bestiary of the eighth or ninth century tells the tale of an elephant great in intellect but feeble in the desire to reproduce. The cure was for him and his mate to travel eastward until, near paradise, they found the mandrake plant [ 281 : 248]. A male and female elephant (Adam and Eve) require the fruit of the mandrake (here, the “Tree of Knowledge”) to arouse their sexual desire [ 282 : 153].…”